★★★☆☆
The soul singer Shaun Escoffery is an old friend of the actor Idris Elba, whom he met when they were students at Barking and Dagenham College. Elba heard him sing during a lunch break and told him, “With a voice like that, you need to be singing professionally.”
He wasn’t wrong: Escoffery is blessed with a purring tenor and a striking falsetto. When the mood takes him, as it did once here, he can be bluesy and testifying too. Dressed in a brilliant white jacket over black T-shirt and jeans, the 40-year-old had the air of a detective in Miami Vice. So he sounded and looked the part of the suave soul man.
Much of the show, however, was polished but pedestrian. Too many tracks were from the “Will this do?” school of songwriting: from Perfect Love Affair (“Just you and me baby”) to Nobody Knows (“Nobody knows what you do to me”). Some of the stage patter was equally banal. “It’s not hard to love each other, man, our differences are not that big,” he said during one break between songs. Noble sentiment; less than Churchillian choice of words.
When the material improved, so did Escoffery. He channelled Curtis Mayfield’s svelte yelp on Nature’s Call and soared over a twinkling keyboard on Days Like This, the hymn to happiness that was remixed into a soulful house classic in 2002. The final song was a controlled, stripped-down rendition of Burt Bacharach’s A House is Not a Home, most famously covered by Luther Vandross, which Escoffery performed on stage with Bacharach last year. A few more songs of that calibre in his locker and he’ll be giving his mate Idris a run for his money.